A Fluid Frontier

A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland
edited by Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker
Wayne State University Press,
304 pages, $55.95

In A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland, editors Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker present essays by both Canadian and American academic and community historians. The collection aims to bridge the African-American and African-Canadian experiences in this transnational region before the American Civil War.

In thirteen essays divided among five themes, A Fluid Frontier introduces readers to the people, places, and events that were instrumental in leading more than thirty thousand refugees to freedom. The short, informative chapters are easy to read, and many of them are illustrated by maps and historic images.

The editors set out to debunk the myths and legends of the Underground Railroad that have been perpetuated in both American and Canadian histories. They do this by seeking to refocus attention on the fact that “African people’s experience of freedom predated their arrival in the West, fuelled their discontent with slavery, and motivated the inexorable migrations that became the Underground Railroad.”

Related to Books

Book Review: This book is a compilation of the CBC-Massey lectures delivered in 2015, under the broad umbrella of the title History’s People, with sections headed Persuasion and the Art of Leadership, Hubris, Daring, Curiosity, and Observers. Margaret MacMillan (a friend of this reviewer for many years) draws effectively on several of her books to present a very varied group of historical subjects.

Book Review: In The Ghost Orchard: The Hidden History of the Apple in North America Helen Humphreys is inspired by the taste of wild apples found outside a log cabin near her home in Kingston, Ontario, to seek their largely unknown origins in terms of Indigenous peoples, women, and artists.

Book Review: James Daschuk’s much-heralded Clearing the Plains is an intricate and well-crafted examination of the historical role of food and disease in the life of First Nations of Western Canada. In a strong first chapter, Daschuk dispenses notions that indigenous sickness and starvation were “new” while gesturing to food security and political autonomy as reasons why these communities flourished for centuries before European contact.